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Making a Screen Recording

I have had several questions asking how I made the videos that I have been posting – specifically the ones that are a “screencast” or “screen recording“. Today I will take you through the process.

I encountered a couple of problems that eventually led me to the screen recording solution. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an audio-visual clip is priceless. I wanted to find a better way of explaining several procedures online, and text alone was a little cumbersome. Hudl is great for live presentations because of the playback features and telestration capabilities. But, when you export video from Hudl to share online or email, there is no audio and the telestrations are not exported with the video. I initially used iMovie and dropped in some still frames that I captured from Hudl (this is an example – Improved Bench Video) but the process was cumbersome. The solution was using Quick Time Player to make a screen recording of a Hudl clip. Below is the process that I use to make the telestrated audio-video clips that I have posted on this blog.

Step One – Recording the video

I use the Hudl iPhone app (it is now available for android as well) to capture the video. If you already have a Hudl account, it is easy to use, and I always have my phone handy. After the class, as soon as I can connect to wifi, I download the videos to the Hudl website, which takes the clips off my phone, and not hogging any storage on my phone. Once on the Hudl site, editing is no different than with a football video clip.

Step Two – Editing the video

I select the clip or clips that I will be using for the video. Editing and telestrating the clip is done exactly the same way you would for football practice or game video. Completing the telestration prior to starting the screen recording makes for a more professional final product. Below is a brief video on how to telestrate the clip.

I use Quick Time Player to make the screen recording. It is resident on Mac’s, and there are similar free programs available for the Windows platform as well. You cannot make a screen recording making a screen recording, so I will resort to text and pictures here. The first step is to open Quick Time Player (or whatever screen recording program you are using), and select File ->New Screen Recording

This will open the Recording interface, which looks like this. At this point, click on the arrow on the right in the black screen recording box, which gives you the menu options for the recording. Select “built in microphone-internal microphone

You can move the black “screen recording box” anywhere on the screen that you like. It does not show up on the screen recording. Next, when you click on the Red recording button, you will get option of recording the entire screen or only a portion of it. If you want to record the entire screen, you click on the gray bar with those instructions and the screen recording will begin. Anything that you do on your computer or that shows up on your screen will be recorded.

If you want to record only a portion of the screen (it takes up much less memory) then you just click and drag, enclosing the part of the screen you want to show up in the recording. Everything outside of the box is “grayed” and will not show up in the recording. To start the recording, click on the small black oval in the middle of your enclosed area.

At this point, it is just a matter of beginning the screen recording, and running through the telestrated video and adding your audio description of the action on the clip. To end the recording you click back on the Record button. Below is a clip showing that process.

Step 4 – Adding A Title with iMovie

If you want to have a little fancier final product with not much additional work, you can use iMovie to add a Title page to it. You can complete any additional video OR audio editing you might need to do in iMovie.

With just a little practice, making a screen recording is really fairly straight-forward. Like many other things, it is amazing all the uses you can think of for this process once you learn how to do it. And how do you learn how to do it? Well, Coach, practice, of course!

You can do this!

You Can Do More!

If you have any questions over this (or any) post, just shoot me an email or leave me a comment – I will reply.